


Happy Families

by SullenSiren (lorax)



Category: Lucifer (Comic)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, Yuletide 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:02:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elaine and Lucifer chat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Families

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/gifts).



> Written for the [yuletide](http://community.livejournal.com/yuletide/profile) challenge. I drew [Fahye](http://fahye.livejournal.com), who had two prompts I could do . . . and I couldn't pick, and did them both. For Lucifer, she wasn't specific, but I did some digging and saw that she liked Elaine a whole lot, so I hope this works for you! Happy Holidays!

**Happy Families**   
_"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton,  
you may as well make it dance."  
\-- George Bernard Shaw_

"It's an homage," the young girl said, wings rustling behind her as she manifested an apple and bit into it.

"There is a careful line between homage and blatant theft," her companion answered wryly, smoothing a hand down the front of his suit. He walked with his hands behind his back, bright blond head bent slightly in deference to his slight companion. "One might even call it blasphemous -- considering your chosen company."

"I think I get to decide that now. And since I did the inviting and the party decorations, what I say goes," the girl answered. She sidestepped a boar rustling a grub from the grassy earth.

"You have a point," he answered, watching the boar. The grub was bright blue. "And still. There are some differences."

The girl sat with a rustle of fabric and wings that were as false as the grass she pulled up with thin fingers. "So did I get it right? Is this what it looked like?"

He folded his legs to sit opposite her on the blanket that had appeared from no where. "It bears a resemblance." He looked over the tree-lined horizon at the slowly purpling sunset. "A paint-by-numbers copy, perhaps." He went silent, watching the sun creep its way down the sky.

She didn't speak, either, just watched. Finally -- because she was young, even if she was dead and immortal and a god and God all at once -- she couldn't stand it. "What are you thinking, Lucifer?"

"You could see for yourself, if you wanted. Your limitations are mostly imagined, now," he answered.

"Just because I could doesn't mean I would. It's your mind. I don't think I should get a peepshow just because I wrote my name on some gates," she answered, sounding aggravated at the idea. The cosmos had a thing, though. He was right. Take away a Yahweh, it wanted another, and she was closest, so she got the job.

He turned to her at that, and there was a faint smile across his sharp, beautiful features. "I was thinking that I prefer the original coloration, but the current company, Elaine."

Elaine smiled widely at that. "Cool." She looked up at the purple sky, and time slid backwards, clouds pouring back across the skies as time sped backwards and the colors shifted to scarlet and oranges and a burning yellow. "There. Original. Happy now, Van Gogh?"

"It suffices."

Elaine leaned back on her hands, feeling the grass between her fingers because she wanted to. It didn't itch, because she chose not to let it. "Maybe I should make this real. A new Garden in one of the worlds. Paradise reborn, or something. It's pretty."

"It would decay. That's the nature of Paradise."

"Yeah, I know. And it's better to leave things as they are. Not interfere. Let it happen. Blah blah blah. I get it." Elaine pulled up a blade of grass and tossed it at Lucifer. The Lightbringer arched a brow and brushed it off. "So, are you?" she asked abruptly.

"Am I?"

"Happy," she clarified. She didn't think she really had to. He always knew what she meant. It was what he did. But he liked to make her say things, more so now than before. She thought maybe it was because of what she was and what he was and how sometimes it was his nature to go against her, even though she wasn't the one who'd made him that way.

Lucifer looked over at the sunset again. "I'm sitting in a remade Eden with Yahweh's heir apparent, discussing dubious art choices. It's an odd question."

"And that's not an answer," Elaine answered. She wasn't surprised; getting a straight answer out of Samael was like herding cats -- smart cats with sharp claws. "Free of pre-destination, creator of a cosmos, alive and well . . . well, figuratively speaking, I guess. Your friends still alive." Elaine paused, and then amended again. "Figuratively speaking, I guess." She didn't think she'd ever heard Lucifer profess friendship to anyone. Not even Mazikeen, and she was pretty sure they were a lot more then friends. (Okay, she knew they were more, but omniscience was a bitch and she tried not to pay attention to all the things she knew. Plus, it was complicated, just like anything else having to do with Lucifer.)

"I hadn't considered it," Lucifer answered, and there was a trace of wry humor in his voice, though few would hear it. The devil had a sense of humor.

"So consider it."

He tipped his head back again. His wings were hidden, but they cast a shadow across the grass anyway. A snake was curled around the branches of the tree above them -- because God had a sense of humor, too. Or at least this one did. "I'm not unhappy."

Elaine made a frustrated noise, flopping back onto the grass. "You miss my father." She didn't look, but she could still see him stiffen. Omniscience. She wished the off switch worked better. She was starting to understand why Yahweh hadn't come down to walk amid his world. It was a bummer knowing everything.

Lucifer didn't speak, but his silence said volumes. There were things that Lucifer didn't discuss; mourning was one of them. Elaine had broken the rules. But then, Elaine was more or less above the rules. "Sometimes, I am reminded of him," he answered after a silence that might have been moments, and might have been years. This tiny Eden in the center of nothingness didn't measure time like any other place.

She sat up at that. "Yeah. Me too." She hadn't known Michael. Not really. She wished she had. They probably wouldn't have gotten along, but it would have been nice to see. "He was good."

"He was," Lucifer answered, and it didn't precisely sound like a compliment. Michael had stayed faithful long after Lucifer headed down his path. If you looked at it from one perspective, Michael had been the good son, and Lucifer the prodigal. And yet Lucifer was the one who had saved the world in the end. Sort of. Black and white so rarely applied.

"I remind you of him," Elaine told him, and it was a statement, not a question. She knew that. Not because of godlike powers - Godpowers, actually - but just because in a weird way, she kind of knew Lucifer as well as anyone save Mazikeen. Because she was herself, and she was her father's daughter. And because he was a subject she'd wanted to study, since their first meeting.

"Perhaps," Lucifer allowed. And it was difficult to read the Morningstar's moods - omniscience aside - but there might have been a trace of sadness laced through the word.

Elaine laid her arms across her knees and looked at him. A glint of sunlight pierced through the trees, turning his bright head to gold and dappling the skin of his neck. He lifted an eyebrow and she shrugged. "You're pretty. Might as well make the frame nice."

Lucifer laughed, and the sound was rare enough that Elaine shifted the laws of sound, letting it echo long past when a laugh should have died. He looked amused at the conceit.

Silence welled up again, but it was comfortable. Friendly, almost, though Elaine tried not to think the word. It seemed presumptuous. Even if she had saved the guy's life and all. Finally she looked at him, letting the sunbeam fade away. "I could-"

"No," he interrupted. His eyes glowed - of their own accord, not her artistry - and he looked at her, expression grim and resolute. "No copies. No do-overs. Michael made his choice."

Michael had chosen between a rock and a hard place, Elaine thought. She thought he might want another chance, if for no other reason than so Lucifer wasn't the one who had killed him. But she nodded. "Yeah. Okay." She stirred the grass again. "So tell me about him."

Lucifer smiled again. "There's nothing I can tell you that you can't know for yourself."

"I know. But I'd rather you tell me."

There wasn't any way for Lucifer to tell her about Michael without telling her about himself. They were two sides of Yahweh's plans, Lucifer the Will and Michael the Power. In talking about his brother, Lucifer would tell her about himself. And much as she wanted to know about her father, it wasn't really because of him that she asked. She was pretty sure Lucifer knew that, too.

She was sure that would be why he refused, but the Morningstar had never been predictable . . . Well, okay. Yahweh had predicted most of it, but that didn't count. And in the end, Yahweh's only unknown, he'd still not quite known what the first of his sons would do.

He started to talk. He told her things she already knew, but the stories slanted differently through his dry voice and wise eyes. He spoke of Michael, of the early days, of the pettiness of the Host and the strange fashions of the demons. He spoke of a time when he and Michael were brothers in truth, as well as name, wing to wing across Yahweh's side. He spoke of the building of the Silver City, the seduction of Lilith - who had spoken to him as no angel would, and in whose womb Michael saw disaster and triumph, though he never approached her.

The sunset and rose and set again, for the scenery, rather than to mark time. When Lucifer went silent, he looked at Michael's daughter and smiled, humor in it -- and perhaps sadness. "Are you satisfied, Elaine Belloc?"

"No. But it's a start," she answered. She stood, and he did the same, the world changing under their feet, garden giving way to the blankness of nothing that had existed before she created that space. "I don't think you killed him," Elaine said suddenly. She didn't speak out loud. There was no sound within the nothing they walked through. There was no movement, either, but sometimes you just wanted to keep moving and forget the logic. Nothing made sense anyway, half the time.

Lucifer didn't answer, but she didn't want him to. She went on. "I think I did. Or he did. Mostly him. He was, you know, Michael. But I think that he'd been the Demiurgos for so long that he just . . . couldn't change. Or wouldn't. But he thought I could. So he just . . . gave it to me."

"Then I suppose neither of us need fear the Kindly Ones," Lucifer answered dryly. He didn't fear the three, anyway. He was Lucifer Morningstar. There were some even the Eumenides would not seek. He lifted a hand to his throat, where a key had once hung. "Those who live for endless ages sometimes find that they cannot change."

"You change," Elaine answered. "That's why you're still here."

"Yes. And why I have more faith in our current administration than I did in the last."

He meant that Elaine changed, too, and she smiled, understanding. "I guess maybe I'm a little like my uncle, huh?" He gave her a sideways look, and she laughed. "Uncle Lucifer. Pretty weird, huh?"

"And utterly irrelevant, considering."

"But still funny." Elaine took a step, and suddenly they were walking through blue skies, watching planes passing underneath on a path back and forth from the airport. "Detroit," she explained.

She sat down on a cloud, mostly because she thought the cliché would amuse him. "It's weird. What I am. I mean, I never really got to . . . grow up. Learn to kiss. Learn to dance. Have sex. Any of that stuff."

"It's not lost to you. Take a mortal form for a time, if you like. You would not be the only one to do so," Lucifer answered.

"Yeah, but then I wouldn't be an original," Elaine answered. "I mean, what's the fun if Death did it first?" She kicked off cloud fluff. "You could come with me."

He laughed, and she was almost startled by the sound, as she hadn't been courting it this time. It was kind of cool, though, that she made him laugh. "Even a day in a mortal form, and they would line up to kill me, little Yahweh."

"Call me Elaine. And so what? You die, and then you're you again. Besides. You'd be with me. You can teach me to play piano."

"You know how."

"Yeah, but I've never been taught." Elaine looked at him. "What good is saving the world if we don't have any fun in it?"

"Your definition of fun is not mine, Elaine."

"I don't think you have one, actually. Come on. We'll bring Mazikeen, and she can kill you for making her mortal, and then I'll just bring you back again." Lucifer shook his head, but there was amusement hidden behind his sculpted face. "Promise you'll think about it."

"I'll consider it," he told her. "And for now, I've things to do."

"Yeah. Tell Mazikeen I said hi," Elaine answered. She could have told her herself; Elaine was sort of everywhere, after all. But she tried not to think about that, either. "And you promised."

He hadn't, actually, but he'd said he would, and to Lucifer, that was pretty much the same thing. He paused for a moment, studying her. "You are more than your father's daughter, Elaine."

He didn't explain why, and a blink later he was gone. But she understood. She was Michael's daughter, but she was Elaine, too. (God-thing aside.) And if she hadn't been, he wouldn't put up with so much of her crap.

She hugged a smile to her chest (Literally, she manifested a chest and a little lip-smile and hugged it. It squished like a stuffed teddy. Sometimes being pretty much all-powerful was kind of cool.). When she made them mortal, maybe she'd make them all schoolkids. He would hate that. And when he hated things, he kind of liked them, because at least it was different.

The cloud she sat on became an elaborate sculpture. On Earth beneath her a thousand cameras snapped pictures of three cloud Angels flying side-by-side, two tall and strong and one smaller and slight. If Lucifer saw, he didn't say anything. But he saw. Elaine kind of knew. She was pretty sure he was laughing. Or as close as he usually came, anyway.


End file.
